Officials: Taliban May Have Faked Civilian Slaughter

Did the Taliban stage a slaughter of dozens, to make U.S. forces in Afghanistan look like butchers? That’s what American military officials are implying in response to claims that coalition airstrikes killed dozens of civilians taking shelter from fighting between Taliban militants and international troops in Afghanistan’s Farah Province.

The International Committee of the Red Cross reported dozens of dead, but Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, suggested that the deaths may not have been caused by airstrikes. McKiernan told reporters in Kabul: “We have some other information that leads us to distinctly different conclusions about the cause of these civilian casualties.” An anonymous defense official took things a bit further, telling the Washington Post‘s Greg Jaffe: “the Taliban went to a concerted effort to make it look like the U.S. airstrikes caused this.”

According to the New York Times, forensic investigators are investigating the possibility that Afghan civilians were killed by grenades thrown by Taliban fighters, who then paraded the bodies around a village, claiming the dead were killed by American bombs. And Col. Greg Julian, the main U.S. military spokesman in Kabul, downplayed the total number of casualties, telling The Wall Street Journal he was “pretty sure the high numbers of casualties are not going to prove true.”

This is not the first time the U.S. military has rejected claims of civilian deaths from coalition airstrikes. Last year, coalition officials dismissed claims — backed by the United Nations and the Afghan government — that an airstrike on the village of Azizabad killed dozens of civilians. After a series of follow-on investigations, the U.S. military revised the civilian body count upwards, but also maintained that most of those killed were Taliban militants.

A joint U.S.-Afghan investigative team is on the ground in Farah, but that may not repair the damage to Afghan public opinion. Reporting on civilian casualties is a tricky business, especially when the Taliban are quick to seize on civilian deaths as evidence of the coalition’s callousness. U.S. Marine Corps Commandant James Conway last year even suggested that the Taliban deliberately surround themselves with civilians to “reap an IO [information operations] advantage.”

And that’s the larger issue. Joshua Foust, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, said it was important that the coalition not rush to disavow claims of civilian deaths while they conduct a follow-on investigation. Maintaining credibility in the eyes of Afghans, he argued, is the most important thing.

“If the coalition, instead of rushing to declare itself blameless and diligent immediately after combat, admitted the possibility of innocent casualties, that would increase the likelihood for widespread confidence in the follow-up investigation,” he wrote. “This runs counter to the very real need to tightly restrict information. Yet in a war that relies as much on perception as it does success in battle, this tendency to hunker down and deny an unfortunate reality does far more harm than good.”